


Narrow leaves still tell her name

by faceofstone



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen, Walks In The Woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-21 08:57:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9540629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: Laura isn't sure that it counts as a good deed if she barely did anything in the end, but once, just this once, she reached out to the woods and the woods gave her a happy end, and that's enough for her.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HannaM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HannaM/gifts).



Margaret's morning walks follow and record the ebb and flow of humankind in the woods beyond Twin Peaks. A truck's tires dent the track that connects the mill to the train graveyard every night after it rains, until one stormy week in April erases all traces of its passage. It may never have been there, and it never will again. Only Margaret's footsteps are left in the mud. Secret friends snap the branches that cover the shortcut to a sunlit glade. The firs’ shadow gives solace to three rust-eaten bicycles, resting their final rest hundreds of feet away from the municipally-approved paths.  
And there are other routes, other patterns. Some she sees and hears, like the flight of birds. Some are attuned to different sights and sounds, and she is informed of those by her log. The intersection of human past and humanless present marks coordinates, but the map, as always, remains hidden.

Today, her log hears muffled sobs. She does too, coming from beyond the curve in the path, when it will cross the major dirt road that cuts Ghostwood in half in a rush to reach the Pearl Lakes. Margaret hurries her steps.

Laura Palmer is kneeling in the middle of the road, on a carpet of pine needles, and weeping. She is dressed way beyond her fifteen years and alone in the woods at the crack of dawn, but she is not hurt, she is not bruised. Margaret knows not to stoke embers, so she sits by her side, balances the log on her right arm and silently wraps the other one around her young friend's shoulders. Her log cannot say who else might have stopped in this place - Laura herself was under a shadow. Sometimes owls are big, Margaret once told her when she was younger. The fact remains true, and their wings reach far.

“It's this sapling,” Laura eventually says in a drug-addled singsong whisper. “It's so small.” She laughs through her tears. “So tiny.”  
There is, in fact, a tuft of bright green leaves growing next to Laura's knees, as lively, perfect and wonderful as saplings are wont to be, begging Margaret to kneel closer and take a good look at its beauty. So she does - she could never say no to a sapling.  
“This is a very young cedar,” Margaret explains to her friend, guiding her hand to feel its scale-like, flat branchlets.  
“Cedar,” Laura repeats in her impression of a low, booming voice, of the sort one would imagine a grown tree to speak in, if it could (this is not altogether accurate, but Margaret doesn't feel like correcting her). “You could have grown to be a big cedar, instead you were born in… the wrong place… at the wrong time…” Her voice cracks as she speaks, broken by a new stream of sobs, and it's not hard to see what drove her to tears: the little one took roots on a road. Sooner rather than later, a car will crush it.  
“A tree has many branches. Already from their youth, they see many paths. And when one is dried, others still grow in its stead. Come, I will teach you how to transplant your new friend and give it a safer home.”  
Laura listens to her every word with her mouth open in a small “o”, caught in a dream of different lives maturing like fruit on distant, sunlit boughs, so far from her own. She shakes her head.  
“There is too much smoke in my room… in my house. That is good for dead salmon, not plants.”  
Margaret remembers young Sarah holding onto her first cigarette like a lifeline. Chances are that the girl is not speaking in metaphors, or if the smoke is a metaphor, as it often is, it is a tangible one, turning the walls gray and the rooms inhospitable. She also remembers, however, that a younger Laura, a few years back, used to proudly march into the RR with a kitten sleeping on her shoulder, while her words today barely mask a terror of the responsibility that comes from taking care of another living being. Some changes come with natural growth, others are consequences of human choices but still good. This change, Margaret will weep for.  
“There is no fire in my house.”  
“I wish I could live there.”  
“Then your young friend will.” Margaret could never say no to a sapling, anyway, and her log has been humming a soft note of approval for a solid minute now. “And you will visit it, and find no fire. Kindness does not go wasted.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Saplings!](http://www.glastonberrygrove.net/texts/cards/info/card42.html)


End file.
